


An Interesting Gift

by cirque



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Fantasy, Gen, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28921326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: She received many gifts for her sixteenth birthday and the dragon egg is, regretfully, the least interesting.
Relationships: Beloved Princess of the Realm & Newly-Hatched Dragon who Imprints Upon Her
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	An Interesting Gift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheeon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheeon/gifts).



It’s an interesting gift, so she keeps it. 

She’s never seen a dragon egg before (who has?) so she isn’t sure if it’s supposed to smoke like this or what, but she presses her ear to the rough exterior. Nothing. What did she expect? Is she supposed to talk to it? She smiles at the duke.

“Thank you,” she says, even as her mother is rolling her eyes and her father looks utterly perplexed. They had expected jewels, probably.

“It was found by a traveler friend of mine, on an expedition to the Western Wastes,” the duke says, eyes alight with excitement. “He found it hidden in the ruins of some stricken castle. It was struck by lightning on the way back, he said. I thought it would make an excellent present for you, your highness.”

She smiles, because she is polite, because it has been drilled into her. She shakes the dragon egg experimentally, but nothing happens. “Will it hatch?”

Her mother holds back a squeak of panic. The duke looks at her, unnerved.

“Probably not, your highness,” he says, hurriedly. “Dragons have been extinct for a thousand-some years. It’s just a bauble, a curiosity. Just something to look at. It will never hatch.”

  


* * *

  


It hatches.

She’s asleep when it happens, but that horrific cracking echoes through her dreams and she sits up. She’d left the egg on her dressing table, there among her mirrors and her perfumes. She’d forgotten about it, truth be told. She received many gifts for her sixteenth birthday and the dragon egg is, regretfully, the least interesting.

It’s leaning to one side now, and there’s a thick white line down the middle of the shell. It wobbles from within. Eira kneels down beside the table, entranced. The crack deepens, joins with a twin, and hisses black smoke. She reaches out to dislodge some of the stony exterior and reveals, within, a tiny bird-like creature, not three inches tall. _A dragon,_ complete with thin, veiny wings.

“Hello,” she says. 

The dragon pushes its way out of the shell, leaving the only home it has ever known behind. It wobbles forward into her waiting hands, cupped to secure it. She lifts it up to eye level, peering into those black beedy eyes, still foggy from the hatching. It opens its mouth and tries a mighty roar, but it comes out as a faint mew, like an indignant kitten.

“I see,” she says.

  


* * *

  


She calls him Charles.

He goes everywhere with her. First on her shoulder, wobbly but determined, his raptor-like talons ripping into all her best dresses. He breathes smoke when he gets excited, and it warms the cup of her ear, though she finds herself coughing more often.

His wings thicken up and he gets stronger, and so eventually he is able to flap along beside her, the size of a blackbird, but shinier and more muscular. He will be big. He follows her like a gosling follows its mother.

People stare, as people do. He’s the first dragon in over a thousand years, and he’s a pretty one at that, and everyone is worried about what he’ll grow into, what manner of creature he will be. They wonder how he came to be at all.

They call it magic, but magic is only the word they use when nothing else makes sense. No one understands where he came from, or why, or how, but Eira does not care. They bring the duke in for questioning and demand to see the friend that retrieved the egg, but he’s nowhere to be found.

Charles eats bugs at first, and she has the gardener bring him some a few times a day. He spits out his smoke at them in an immature attempt to roast them, and then his lithe tongue licks out and gobbles them up. 

  


* * *

  


Her parents allow a mission to the Western Wastes, to seek knowledge of dragons and, though no one is saying it, to perhaps find more eggs.

“I want to go,” Eira tells them, in no uncertain terms.

“Absolutely not,” says her mother. “You’re a princess of this realm, the _only_ princess. You’re not going on some half-planned expedition to the end of the world. Do you have any idea how far away the Wastes are?”

Charles has moved onto small rodents now, and his smoke has more substance. He hovers by Eira’s side, never too far away. He has turned the most beautiful shade of green, serpentine in the candlelight, a flash in the light like wet grass.

“I have to learn more about Charles,” she insists.

“You’ll learn when they return, hmm?” Her mother scowls at Charles. The Queen does not approve of her heir’s new pet. If it were up to her they’d slaughter him and send him to the scientists for dissection like a common frog.

“You’re not going,” says her mother with all the airs of finality. “You’re forbidden.”

  


* * *

  


She goes anyway.

She takes her second-favourite horse and joins the back of the convey. It’s all burly knights and their squires, and so she fits in easily with the boys. She ties her hair up and away and hides it under a helmet. Charles rests between her breasts, warming her in her leathers.

It’s a long journey, and she’s cautious of the fact that Charles will grow too rapidly, but there’s not much she can do about that. She sneaks him meat that the convoy hunts, little morsels of boar or hind for him to scorch.

She hangs at the back, mostly, keeping to herself, trying not to speak for fear of betraying her royal accent. The boys take her in as their own, and they travel in this way for several hundred miles, the days eeking into weeks, the horses growing tired, the men disheartened. But it’s a quest, an adventure, and Eira feels excitement ever growing in her chest.

  


* * *

  


They find her. 

It isn’t surprising; Charles grows at an alarming rate, and there comes a point when he is too large to stuff down her shirt and remain inconspicuous. She is digging latrines one day when Charles hiccups in his sleep and sets her woolen jacket on fire. She bats at the flames but someone sees anyway and grabs her by the elbow, shaking her, jostling Charles free. He rears up and goes to spit fire on his attacker before Eira yelps and grabs him, holding him to her smoking chest. He is perhaps the size of a woodpigeon now, and about as easily contained.

“Princess?” The knight scowls, and she can do little else but curtsey and hope he doesn’t punish her too much. It’s only Reginald, he’s known her since she was tiny, so he doesn’t really scare her but she feels awful guilty for deceiving him so long.

“Your parents forbade--” He clamps his jaw shut, frowning down at her. 

He can’t send her back, it’s too far to travel alone and anyway, they’re almost there. He ties her horse to his and demands she ask for permission to even so much as eat. He doesn’t let her out of his sight for the rest of the trip.

  


* * *

  


The Wastes are toxic. Long ago there was a war here, a war with dragons like in the legends, a war of fire and smoke and poison. It still clings to the air, determined to choke them as they pass. The land is barren, the soil salted and burned, the trees reduced to smoking bits of charcoal. Eira wonders that Charles had survived here so long, in his egg, all alone.

Charles flickers around her, never flying too far away. He investigates the ruins of the Western lands and comes fluttering back to nuzzle into her neck, as if saying “look what I found”.

They find no more eggs amid the chaos, no more signs of any dragons, living or dead, besides the graveyard where the people of the Western lands had once interred their precious dragons. The bones were stacked in a pile some hundred-feet tall, teeth juttering out at odd angles. Eira panicked a little when she saw that. Would Charles really get so big? Or would he always be little and quiet and harmless?

  


* * *

  


They return empty-handed, but for a collection of half-ruined books on dragonlore and the Western Empire that once ruled the lands. They spoke of numerous dragons, whole flocks of them, terrible and deadly, wild things bearing wilder humans. The dragons burned entire villages, adding each destroyed settlement to the empire like they were little more than pieces pushed across a chess board with reckless abandon.

It ended in flames. Eventually the dragons turned on their masters, not content with villages--they scolded whole cities, every last stronghold belonging to the humans. They burned their masters with all the fury of a captive striking out at their prisoners.

And it is this news that the convoy relays to the King and Queen: the dragons are savage. They are not viable tools. They are dangerous beasts. Their extinction is a blessing. 

Eira hangs back. What about Charles?

  


* * *

  


They lock him up. He’s the size of a medium dog by now, and just as boisterous. He spits out fire at anything and everything. He hisses at his captors. Eira wonders why they haven’t learned from the past.

She goes to visit him as often as possible, but her parents forbid her from going near him. Still she goes. She is his mother.

There are talks about killing him, lopping off his head before he’s big enough to do any real damage.

“Get her a puppy,” the kennel master says as he locks the door once more on Charles’s yips of panic. “A dragon is no pet at all.”

“He’s _mine,_ ” Eira insists, and the kennel master laughs at her.

“He’ll turn on you,” he warns.

“He would never,” she says, but she is not so sure.

  


* * *

  


She turns seventeen. There are no dragon eggs among her gifts this year.

  


* * *

  


She turns eighteen. She hasn’t visited Charles for so long, she wonders if he’ll even recognise her. They haven’t killed him, yet; they plan to keep him alive as a threat against any enemy invasion. 

She leans against his cell beneath the kennels. He is much larger than the last time she’d seen him--he’s the size of a draught horse now, thick about the withers, with a long luxurious tail of molten green.

He is contained by thick tempered steel and tungsten, tough enough not to melt in the fire that he belches forth. He looks miserable. His head hangs low.

She reaches out an experimental hand to touch the scaly nibs of his ears. He leans into her and breathes out smoke into her face. She giggles. He used to do that when he was tiny.

“I’m so sorry about this,” she whispers.

It is a wonder he doesn’t hate her.

He purrs, almost, a sort of tickly sound in his lithe throat.

“I miss you too,” she sighs. “Want to go for a fly?”

  


* * *

  


It takes a lot of convincing for them to agree to let him stretch his wings, but the islands to the south are threatening war and they need all the weapons they can get, and so Charles is permitted a short, supervised flight. He screams into the winds and stretches his wings as far as they will go.

Eira runs by his side to begin with, but he lands before her, graceless and clumsy with excitement. He nudges at her arms, at her legs, messing up her carefully coiffed hair. He tries to push her onto his back and she wonders…

“I’m too big to ride you.”

But he keeps insisting and so she gives up, mounting him like a horse. He’s a little wider about the ribs and there’s nothing intuitive to grip onto so she grabs his neck spikes and hopes it isn’t hurting him.

They fly. They _dance_. It’s the most natural thing in the world, the easiest movement she’s ever made. She doesn’t slip like she’d expected, she fits neatly into the groves of his back. She doesn’t even mind the height.

She’s busy loving every moment, but as they glide past the north tower, she sees someone watching them, one of the squires from the convoy, a tall laughing young man who cheers as they go by. Jacob, that’s his name.

“You’re a natural!” he hoots and, she supposes, she is.

  


* * *

  


They want her to ride him to the islands. Just a fly-by, a show of strength, high enough in the sky that she can’t take any damage if they do, inevitably, try to attack. They’re a stubborn lot, those islanders, and they are skilled in archery and so she wonders, worriedly, if Charles’s leathery skin is tough enough to survive an arrow prick or two.

It’s fifty miles to the coast, then another ten miles oversea. It’s the furthest she’s ever flown him and she is, admittedly, a little worried. What if he gets tired? What if she loses grip?

Jacob tells her not to think too much about it. 

“It’s basically a diplomatic mission,” he says.

“On dragonback! With intent to scare them into submission.”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

She isn’t sure what she feels about using Charles like this. He’s still a young dragon, barely approaching adolescence. He is too young to get involved in a war--he can’t quite form a fireball yet. Flames, sure, but the actual substance of it leaves something to be desired.

  


* * *

  


They’re at war. They want Charles to burn the island’s capital. Eira isn’t sure if his baby flames could even damage stone walls yet, and she definitely doesn’t want him to put himself at risk like that.

They’re not keen on her going, either, and so Jacob offers to go instead. He’s almost a knight now, and he’s ridden on Charles with her a few times. She isn’t sure what she thinks about _him_ going either, but that’s the kind of thinking she can’t spare right now.

She gives him a flower, tucked in the buttonhole of his jacket.

“Bring him back alive,” she says, though she isn’t sure if it’s meant for Jacob or for Charles.

  


* * *

  


The south islands burn.

  


* * *

  


Eira turns nineteen. They want her to marry. 

  


* * *

  


The war stretches on.

She takes off on Charles and flies back to the Wastes, to show him where he came from. She needs space to _breathe._

He cannot remember their long journey here for information, and instead he experiences everything as if for the first time. He flaps his great wings in the stricken landscape, and Eira can almost imagine what it was like a thousand years ago. He calls to her like a falcon screaming in the emptiness. He is almost full grown. She knows what she has to do. Jacob will be meeting her soon.

She slides off the reins, looses the little saddle the farrier had commissioned for her. She leaves them in the dust, and Charles shakes them free as if he is glad to be rid of their constraints.

“You’re a good boy,” she tells him, though he has a kill count higher than any knight she’s ever met. “You’ll be okay.” He nudges at her side, trying to get her to mount him again. He wants to go home. 

“You have to stay,” she tries to fight back tears, but she fails. “You can’t come home with me, understand? You have to stay here. It’s the only chance you’ll have to be free. They’ll keep using you, and sending you out for battles, and it isn’t fair. None of it is fair, not to you, not to our enemies… It’s better this way, understand?”

She flaps her arms to get him to take off, to go explore the world on his own, to make himself a home among the ruins of his forebears. He stumbles, waiting for her to grip his neck, to slide her legs over his ribs, to stroke his ear to let him know she’s ready.

“I’m not coming,” she sobs. She can hear the hoofs of Jacob’s horse echoing in the empty space. She spots him at the horizon. It has to be now.

“Go on,” she slaps Charles’s back twice and he stumbles away from her. His eyes, still beedy, blink at her in solemn understanding.

“Goodbye,” she tells him, and watches as he takes wing in the smoky sky, until he fades into the fog and she cannot even hear him over the sound of her own thundering heart.

  



End file.
